Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

By Calista McRae

A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn.

Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging.

The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501750984

Book preview

LYRIC AS COMEDY

THE POETICS OF ABJECTION IN POSTWAR AMERICA

CALISTA MCRAE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Permissions

Introduction

1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading

2. Robert Lowell

3. A. R. Ammons

4. Terrance Hayes

5. Coming to Terms with Our Self

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From the outset of this project, Helen Vendler was exceedingly generous with her time, encouragement, and guidance; her remarks on initial drafts of this manuscript made me rethink how I wrote about poetry, and conversations with her have been heartening. Philip Fisher was willing to have long, freewheeling discussions about the book, which left me clearer-headed. Stephanie Burt offered suggestions that invariably turned out to be right. Bill Pritchard and Howell Chickering introduced me to poems, and their ways of reading have stuck with me. Philip Coleman, Marta Figlerowicz, and Walt Hunter provided extremely helpful advice about the stages to publication; Marissa Grunes and Sarang Gopalakrishnan, both gifted with bizarrely fine ears, went over many of these pages.

At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I am lucky to have colleagues who make work a genuine pleasure. I’m especially grateful to Miriam Ascarelli, Louise Castronova, Winifred Cummings, Willie Green, Britt Holbrook, Wieslawa Kapturkiewicz, Eric Katz, Megan O’Neill, Rebekah Rutkoff, and two mentors, Burt Kimmelman and Bernadette Longo. I am equally fortunate to work with NJIT’s bright, considerate, and deadpan students.

In NJIT’s interlibrary loan office, Aimee Calderon and Rhonda Greene-Carter have handled my overly frequent requests patiently and quickly. The Brooklyn Public Library and the New York Public Library have been invaluable; the book would not have gotten off the ground without them. I am also indebted once again to Cecily Marcus and Kate Hujda, at the Upper Midwest Literary Archives of the University of Minnesota.

It’s hard to convey how much this book’s two anonymous reviewers improved the manuscript; they were incredibly discerning, generous, and patient. So was Mahinder S. Kingra, throughout the process: he gave me inspired suggestions and flexible deadlines, both at moments when I needed them. Bethany Wasik, Matthew Kopel, Michelle Witkowski, Michael Durnin (an exceptionally deft copyeditor), and Lynne Ferguson gave me all kinds of help in later stages.

For making each day’s walk to campus somewhat brighter, I am grateful to Peter Monti and Anita Coogan of the Raptor Trust, and to Claus Holzapfel and Mirko Schoenitz. For friendship and conversation, I thank Gaëlle Cogan, Marissa Grunes, Alan Lawn, James McDonnell, Daisuke O, Stella Wang, and Michael Weinstein, and my family—Subramanian Gopalakrishnan and Rekha Warriar, and John, Claire, Annika, and Arleigh McRae—all of whom continue to make life happier. Sarang: thank you for the brilliant and completely foul poems, for tramping across the city to misidentify shorebirds, and for much else.

Parts of these chapters were given at conferences of the American Literature Association (for the Robert Lowell Society), the Modern Language Association (for the Women’s and Gender Studies forum), the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, and the New Jersey College English Association. Some of the book’s ideas began to take shape in " ‘Now someone’s talking’: Unpunctuation and the Deadpan Poem," in Modernism/Modernity 25, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–20. Research for the book was supported by an NJIT start-up grant, and the cost of indexing was covered by the Department of Humanities at NJIT.

PERMISSIONS

I am grateful to Martha Mayou for permission to quote from John Berryman’s unpublished writing, and to John Ammons for permission to quote from A. R. Ammons’s notebooks. I am also grateful for permission to reprint the following:

Marcus Wicker

Self Dialogue Watching Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, from Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker. Copyright © 2013 by Marcus Wicker. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Morgan Parker

See copyright page of this volume.

Kenneth Koch

To My Heart at the Close of Day, from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch by Kenneth Koch. Copyright © 2005 by The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

A. R. Ammons

Ballad. Copyright © 1975 by A. R. Ammons; I Broke a Sheaf of Light. Copyright © 1955 by A. R. Ammons; Renovating. Copyright © 1972 by A. R. Ammons, from The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, vol. 1, 1955–1977, by A. R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Their Sex Life. Copyright © 1990 by A. R. Ammons; Good God. Copyright © 2005 by John R. Ammons., from The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, vol. 2, 1978–2005, by A. R. Ammons, edited by Robert M. West. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Terrance Hayes

The Blue Terrance: I loved Bruce Lee and a ten dollar ukulele … and The Blue Baraka, from Wind in a Box by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 2006 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

How to Be Drawn to Trouble, New York Poem, and Wigphrastic, from How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 2015 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

A House is Not a Home, All the Way Live, and The Avocado, from Lighthead: Poems by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 2010 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Natalie Shapero

Natalie Shapero, excerpts from What Will She Go As?, Teacup, Hot Streak, and My Hand and Cold, from Hard Child. Copyright © 2017 by Natalie Shapero. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Monica Youn

Monica Youn, excerpts from Ignatz Pacificus, Ersatz Ignatz, Semper Ignatz, On Ignatz’s Eyebrow, and So Sweetly Slumbers Ignatz in His Sylvan Bower, from Ignatz. Copyright © 2010 by Monica Youn. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com. All rights reserved.

A version of "Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman’s Dream Songs first appeared as ‘There Ought to Be a Law’: The Unruly Comedy of The Dream Songs," Modern Philology 114, no. 2 (November 2016), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/687117. © 2016 by The University of Chicago.

Introduction

Consider What That Feels Like

In the last fifteen minutes of Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), Richard Pryor turns to the day he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. The way he ends is an example of poetic closure that has stayed with me for years. First he thanks his audience; then he reminds them of the jokes they told about him while he was in the hospital. As he is talking, he strikes a match (he had asked the audience for a light a minute earlier; since then he has been fiddling with the matchbook someone handed him), and says What’s that.¹ No question mark, barely any pause. He moves its flame horizontally in front of his face: Richard Pryor running down the street. The recording ends a second later, on a hard-to-read smile and an arm thrown up in a wave. There is something formally striking in how effortlessly Pryor makes his run down the street and his walk off the stage converge. It is not just the poignant image of a human having the tiny lifespan of a lit match. Pryor has spent an hour alone on a large stage, in his bright red suit, mostly facing utter darkness and the glare of a large spotlight; the match, for an instant, gives him a tiny double, as he doubles himself into an actual joke.

The disaster itself and Pryor’s versions of it become fused in Self Dialogue Watching Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, from Marcus Wicker’s Maybe the Saddest Thing (2012):

What of stepping outside the door on fire?

What of running down a faceless road

Let alone a busy strip, enflamed? Got-damn!

There must be 10,000 selves in an epidermis. Imagine

Yours. Imagine the skin-peeling flame of each self-

Inflicted arson. Imagine the freedom to say God

Damn! To consider what that feels like. To speak

A wild geyser spraying from a busted hydrant.

You watch Richard Pryor in a loud fire engine

Red suit—all flashing lights, sirens: 10,000 selves

Visible to the world, & consider what that feels like.

To think, you may or may not be God damned.

To know, at least, your dick is intact.²

In this exhilaratingly rangy almost-sonnet, Wicker’s speaker is thinking about what it might have been like to be Pryor, and about the intersubjective charge of Pryor’s performances. Look at all the open-ended yous, which encompass not only the selves of the speaker’s dialogue but the reader. And notice the way distance collapses through associative leaps: the loud red suit leads to a literal emergency vehicle, and to the distress signals of an excruciatingly visible act. Wicker is thinking about the limits of sympathy: while the busted hydrant suggests both a damaged human and a human who has shaken off his inner censor, it also allows for a wishful extinguishing of the fire, on the part of the poet. And he is thinking about humor itself, especially in the final line, which recalls Pryor’s retort to those who claim he has been punished by God: No. If God wanted to punish my ass, he’d have burnt my dick.³ Ten thousand shaky selves; one miraculous, corporeal preservation.

Literary criticism of the last fifty years has tended to assume that to be funny, poetry must avoid what we have come to call lyric. Humor is the territory of avant-garde projects, or of witty, formalist, occasional verse, or of other kinds of poems that are expected to have more distance from personal feeling.⁴ But the recent lyric is itself the site of an unpredictable, unruly comedy. While it is often entangled with intense feeling, it is also entangled with humor, just as humor in one’s actual life is sometimes the byproduct of something about which one cares deeply.

Wicker’s poem, which includes the act of stepping outside the traditional little room of the sonnet in its first line, also imagines what it might be like to speak within another genre, to speak / a wild geyser spraying from a busted hydrant. To do so might be to stand in front of an audience and say ‘God damn’ in every way he could think to say it, as Hilton Als recalls, or to change identity by changing voice or posture.⁵ Wicker is not the only contemporary American poet drawn toward and drawing on Pryor: Adrian Matejka has described how Pryor’s monologues helped him avoid some of that natural impulse toward lyricism in Map to the Stars (2017), and Cathy Park Hong mentioned Pryor’s work in a 2013 lecture, where she spoke of her desire to bring stand-up comedy to bear on poetry. I’m often overcome, Hong remarked, with an impulse to rub [poetry’s] nose in the mud.⁶ It is as if Pryor’s performances, and the genre he stretched, are seen as a kind of opposite to what poetry is usually said to entail.

---

Lyric as Comedy makes a set of generalizations about the postwar American lyric and the comic opportunities within it, opportunities derived in part from twentieth-century conceptions of lyric as exceptional. Rei Terada, surveying the history of the recent lyric, finds that Lyricism is one of the qualities that is finally synonymous with the fiction of quality, with the idea that there is quality—whether conceived as ontology or as effect—left over after quantity.⁷ Notions of something special cling to lyric, as Wicker and Matejka and Hong each suggest. It continues to be imagined as aesthetically prestigious, and as circling around a self set off from the social world. Such a view imposes odd expectations on poems that can entail much more.

One explanation for this emphasis on quality has been offered by recent work in historical poetics. A major premise of the New Lyric Studies is that what twentieth-century critics began to call lyric is largely a twentieth-century idea, taking the place of genres that were originally more culturally and historically enmeshed. As lyric gathers genres into itself, both lyric and poetry become sprawling, often almost synonymous concepts. That shift, as Virginia Jackson asserts, has consequences for twentieth-century poetics: When the stipulative functions of particular genres are collapsed into one big idea of poems as lyrics, then the only function poems can perform in our culture is to become individual or communal ideals.⁸ In turn, this process of lyricization—what Jackson and Yopie Prins elsewhere describe as the history of thinking about poetry as more and more abstract and ineffable—encourages self-consciousness about poetry as exceptional.⁹ In trying to define an increasingly idealized, capacious genre, criticism turns to distinctions that do not always fit with how an actual poem actually behaves. As Gillian White’s Lyric Shame makes clear, poets writing what looks like mainstream lyric, from the modernist era through the present day, are uncomfortably aware of the statements potentially made by writing about the personal.¹⁰ While critics like Jackson, Prins, and White have demonstrated that lyric’s conflicted theorizations have been productive for poetry, the comic effects of this confusion have not yet been fully recognized.

Ideal Poems and Their Problems

In many representative twentieth-century definitions, lyric centers above all on subjectivity: around 1957, M. H. Abrams defines lyric as any fairly short, non-narrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of thought and feeling.¹¹ Abrams would have recognized as archetypal lyric the following lines from his near contemporary John Berryman, who tucks his state of mind into a parenthesis that takes up half the poem.

—How are you?—Fine, fine. (I have tears unshed.

There is here near the bottom of my chest

a loop of cold, on the right.

A thing hurts somewhere up left in my head.

I have a gang of old sins unconfessed.

I shovel out of sight

a-many ills else, I might mention too,

such as her leaving and my hopeless book.

No more of that, my friend.

It’s good of you to ask and) How are you?¹²

Whether one is considering lyric on performative or formal grounds, it is usually positioned as the discursive opposite to the conversational mode of How are you? and Fine. But Berryman, who frames his poem with that exchange, seems to be writing a lyric quintessential (according to the definitions I’ll discuss) to the point of being slightly absurd.

In the decades before Berryman tells reader but not friend how he is, the term lyric becomes increasingly associated with the private self. As scholars like Jackson and White have observed, the closeness of the association can be partly attributed to the continued life of John Stuart Mill’s What is Poetry? (1833).¹³ Mill distinguishes between the way events act on our feelings (through novels, gossip, and other supposedly shallow forms) and the way the "representation of feeling acts through poems.¹⁴ This distinction allows him to make a case for poetry as the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of the human heart and for the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener; as Sarah MacKenzie Zimmerman writes, Mill inaugurates a critical history of divorcing lyricism from rhetorical—and by extension, social—concerns, and thus from an audience.¹⁵ Without a listener, in complete privacy, Berryman’s speaker can encapsulate the difficulty of putting how one is feeling into words (most of which, in his poem, are monosyllables). His Fine, fine collides with unreleased tears, that physical symptom of being unable to express; the awkward, endless loop of cold, on the right chills the rest of the parenthesis, and the indescribable thing" that throbs to one side of the head can only vaguely be pointed at.

Mill’s desire to elevate poetry, to keep it free of any vulgar awareness of a readership, leads to a standard postwar way of discussing lyric: abstracted from most contexts but that of a universal human self. After being reaffirmed in W. B. Yeats’s belief that the poet never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, it is turned into textbook form by the New Critics.¹⁶ It reappears in Northrop Frye’s 1957 explanation that the poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners, in Tilottama Rajan’s 1985 description of pure lyric as a monological form, and in Harold Bloom’s 1994 reference to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.¹⁷ In such accounts (most forcefully in Bloom, who sees his favored literature as beleaguered by more populist forms) poetry centers on the individual, on the self barely keeping it together in Berryman’s rueful, surly, down-and-out yet wry Dream Song.

As Jackson writes, the idea of an abstracted personal lyric as given shape by the New Criticism remains the normative model for the production and reception of most poetry.¹⁸ That is to say, the question of How are you has come to dominate lyric reading, especially in the common postwar pedagogical form of What can we deduce about this fictive speaker. By 1960, most poems are read as expressing fictive inner lives, partly so that poems can partake in what Herbert Tucker calls the myth of unconditioned subjectivity: if there is no actual writer or history attached to a poem, the utterances of its speaker have some hope of universality.¹⁹

But although The Dream Songs announces a speaker named Henry rather than John, its transparent subject is an actual poet. And while Berryman’s lines seem of a piece with what Frederick Buell, reviewing the midcentury’s anthology wars, sums up as New Critical formalism, ‘academic’ poetry, and emphasis on the poem as a closed, crafted artifact, the seams are beginning to show.²⁰ There are traces of embarrassment, resentment, and comedy in how this speaker relays how he is, to himself and to a listener, over and over; this Dream Song is number 207 out of 385. The poem evinces constant self-consciousness about its postures and ways of confiding: it is not just that the speaker bristles at the question of his clueless colleague, but that he is in a position of addressing a reader, someone who seeks to pin down a tone and situation. His No more of that, my friend seems at least half-addressed to that reader.²¹ And even within his silent answer, he is growing a bit rhetorical, mentioning the last two ills by saying he will not mention them.

---

Attempts to mark the generic boundaries of the lyric—to seal it off from other kinds of language, as the parentheses in Song 207 self-consciously seal off the private from the social—have contributed to the sense that lyric is exceptional: a fluctuating mass of mutually reinforcing ideals continues to assert the importance of quality to poetry, and to what poetry is presumed to do. Poems are supposed to be aesthetically accomplished, both finished and polished. (Though Berryman depicts a ragged emotional state, he does so in a scrupulously rhyming form, and his hesitating or somewhat overarticulated cadences come from standard metrical substitutions.)

Over the years in which a Mill-inflected view of privacy and universality becomes formalized, the expectations placed on poetic language intensify. Shira Wolosky sums up the main linguistic expectations, which figure the poem as a self-enclosed aesthetic realm; as a formal object to be approached through more or less exclusively specified categories of formal analysis; as metahistorically transcendent; and as a text deploying a distinct and poetically ‘pure’ language.²² Poetic language becomes viewed as a stylistic and linguistic opposite to clichés like How are you? and Fine, fine. Thus the question of How are you both seems to get at what a twentieth-century idealized expressive lyric is and seems its mundane, social, phatic opposite.

As Wolosky’s summary indicates, idealized lyric language departs from everyday stock phrases in general; it seeks ways of saying that articulate more than words usually denote. R. P. Blackmur, for example, distinguishes poetry from mere verse on linguistic grounds: poetry is defined by language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the available stock of reality.²³ The idea of the poem’s language as special received a particularly forceful twist through formal concepts associated with the rise of the New Criticism, like tension and unity—the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, according to Cleanth Brooks.²⁴ Edward Brunner, examining one midcentury glossary of critical terms, sees it as valuing the deft balancing of thought and feeling, with nothing tangential or extraneous: What remains questionable is anything that resembles a style that is overt or individualizing. If style does not melt seamlessly into subject, the poem is less than literary. [The] glossary accurately reflects a New Critical concern that the true poem should leave no impression of superfluity.²⁵ Of course the emphasis on ordering and refining does not originate with the New Criticism (Yeats, building on his assertion that the poet should not sound like he is having a conversation over breakfast, goes on to declare that the poet is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete) but it is heightened during these years: by 1965, the disparate New Critics were being summarized as follow[ing] [I. A.] Richards in his defense of poetry as a means of bringing order to the mind through a synthesis or equilibrium of opposing forces.²⁶

But the kind of private, self-sufficient, clarified verbal structure that the New Criticism imagines, in which emotion is reconciled through style, might in fact accentuate the quite different ways that actual poems handle balance, order, and completion. Consider the opening of Morgan Parker’s 2017 Heaven Be a Xanax, which also begins by invoking a more social mode:

When people say how are you

I say good

It is a rule no one can answer

Crying in the Gap by my therapist’s office

or I am still angry with my parents

for traumatizing me

through organized sports

Dangerous and satisfying body of water

I can still almost remember heaven

or Still a woman slaughtered for wonder

or Unfortunately misplaced grip²⁷

Parker begins with the indecorousness of giving way to emotion in a trendy retail store, surrounded by streamlined mannequins and immaculate clothing. As her imagined replies continue, it becomes less and less certain where they stop; there is no clear demarcation between the poem—that aesthetically justified way of discussing the private—and another enumeration of the socially inappropriate answer. The answers that Parker’s speaker gives, some of which let in bourgeois cultural references, begin to seem excessive even for a poem: they do not appear recollected in tranquility, or mediated, or coordinated in the ways idealized in mainstream criticism. It is a poem seemingly composed of suppressed retorts, and it gets at the impossibility of crystallizing one’s feelings in a poem; a single answer would not be enough, or would soon grow inaccurate. Crying in the Gap becomes a brilliantly wry emblem for what this poem does.

Parker’s lines underscore the way that representing lived experience might need to include the incomprehensible, unsubordinated fragment. They press at the friction that comes from putting perforated, nebulous, chaotic feelings into a form—into something arranged, revised, logical, patterned, polished. While it might seem anachronistic to apply midcentury precepts to this twenty-first-century poem, the critical emphasis on concerted style is not confined to the midcentury. As White observes, the nebulous ‘lyric’ abstraction that continues today draws on aspects of critical theory drawn from writings associated with the ‘New Criticism’ that were overcirculated, dulled, and naturalized into tokens of pedagogic culture—eccentricities made central.²⁸ Parker’s opening exemplifies the sense, shared by each poet in this book, that it can sometimes be impossible to deal with psychological events in a meaningful order, to handle each proportionally, though one is writing in a form still trailing ideals of proportion and coherence. In Heaven Be a Xanax, something comic surfaces in the conflictual relations between what one feels, knows, and says: it exposes a rift between how one is and how one is supposed to present oneself, in or out of the poem.

Both Berryman’s cluster of imagined answers and Parker’s potentially never-ending cascade of them suggest a kind of flickering comic potential within lyric: a genre so associated with quality (to use Terada’s word) is positioned not simply to shame or transgress or disappoint, but to be funny. Rather than stemming from control, the comedy charted in this book arises from impropriety and confusion, from formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, from self-observation and self-staging. Instead of seeing lyric as bestowing order on a record of the mind, and as depicting an emotion universally and fully and truthfully, these poets do not always see a clean fit between idealized understandings of lyric and accurate representations of their experience. Accordingly, writing about the self can inch toward the comic, even when the self is a catastrophe. Trying to answer the question of How are you, in a poem, involves discomfitingly self-conscious discrepancies: one tries to make one’s self into something coherent, even when one is falling apart; though one is not at the breakfast table, one is not in as fully a private mode as New Critical ideals would suggest (to whom is Parker’s speaker speaking?). These discrepancies lead to sheepishness and theatricality and confusion; they also lead to something that can look like stand-up comedy. You are not incidentally writing stand-up when you are writing lyric: as you get close to I. A. Richards’s or Cleanth Brooks’s idea of lyric, you reach the then-emerging genre of stand-up.

Sideways Sprawling

Stand-up is a historically bound form availing itself of an often stylized personality and inner life; as Ian Brodie remarks, the comedian is performing the self.²⁹ And as Christopher Grobe’s recent work on midcentury confession and performance has indicated, some strands of poetry almost converge with stand-up comedy.³⁰ Berryman’s catalogue of misery, for example, has something in common with the 1959 monologue where a shaky, queasy Shelley Berman must call the host of a party at which he wreaked havoc the previous night.³¹ Berman’s guilty admission that I have this little headache in my left eye is not far, anatomically or metrically, from Berryman’s vague, awkward A thing hurts somewhere up left in my head. (It is an unfortunate coincidence that their names are so close; that fluke is not what I want to emphasize.) Language adding to the stock of available reality here emerges from the inarticulate sense that one is in trouble. Everything is out to get one, as heard when Berman mutters to a bottle, "Oh my God don’t fizz, don’t be mean, Alka-Seltzer."

The main link between the phone call and the Dream Song, though, is in how each stages the personal. Although both comedian and poet are creating fictional scenarios, both also (Berman confessing to an invisible interlocutor; Berryman confessing by pointedly not confessing) position us as overhearers. Both also involve an intermittently thin distance between the speaker and the known biography of the artist. While Berman is using the distancing conceit of a telephone, the unease he incarnates cannot be completely separated from the individual imagined behind the stage figure (the individual whom Lainie Kazan called the most anxious, nervous, uptight, neurotic person I ever worked with).³² And by the same token, while Berryman’s list begins as abstract and bodily before moving to widespread existential damage, it ends in straightforward prose admission: my hopeless book, the book you are holding. That is, Berryman, like Berman, adopts personae that stem from his actual self. The speaker, character, or lyric subject seems close to the poet’s own situation, even to his or her own voice, though also deeply and self-consciously artificial.

John Limon proposes that stand-up is about abjection, both in the older meaning of being humiliated, or prostrated, and in Julie Kristeva’s psychoanalytical meaning, of what is neither you nor quite not you—a meaning that Limon describes as the psychic worrying of those aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of (say, a cuticle).³³ As Limon continues, these two meanings are in fact intertwined: "When you feel abject, you feel as if there were something miring your life, some skin that cannot be sloughed, some role (because ‘abject’ always, in a way, describes how you act) that has become your only character." Stand-up comedians perform abjection,